Thursday, October 23, 2008

Here it is. Virginia is being called a battleground state this go around, so there are more nonsense ads, and news stories than usual. Virginia predominately has voted republican for as long as I can remember, but several polls show Obama with a chance of grabbing the state.

Using my technologically advanced scientific polling method (tracking the yard litter trend), I have deduced that there are far more Obama signs out this year compared to John Kerry in the last presidential election. Lynchburg is a "church town", and there is no surprise that you can tell the housing developments that have the moral conservative value voters. Usually they have four to six McCain signs in their yard. But seriously I do see more Obama signs here.

Anyhow, one of the houses that we passed had a different sign up. It said, Vote For Chuck Baldwin. I check it out and he is running for the Constitution party.

Here is a small snippet of an article on his site that is of interest to me. I must state for the record, that I in no way supporting or endorsing him, but I think that more voters should pay attention to the point of the article.

"When asked why they will not vote for a third party candidate, many people will respond by saying something like, "He cannot win." Or, "I don't want to waste my vote." It is true: America has not elected a third party candidate since 1860. Does that automatically mean, however, that every vote cast for one of the two major party candidates is not a wasted vote? I don't think so.

In the first place, a wasted vote is a vote for someone you know does not represent your own beliefs and principles. A wasted vote is a vote for someone you know will not lead the country in the way it should go. A wasted vote is a vote for the "lesser of two evils." Or, in the case of John McCain and Barack Obama, what we have is a choice between the "evil of two lessers."Albert Einstein is credited with saying that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result. For years now, Republicans and Democrats have been leading the country in the same basic direction: toward bigger and bigger government; more and more socialism, globalism, corporatism, and foreign interventionism; and the dismantling of constitutional liberties. Yet, voters continue to think that they are voting for "change" when they vote for a Republican or Democrat. This is truly insane! . . ."

Thursday, October 16, 2008

SSTV is a fancy way of saying sending images via radio. Richard Garriott, A visitor to the space station brought and setup the sstv equipment. every five minutes it sends an image down.

I wasn't sure if the low tech antenna setup that I made would actually perform well enough to receive an adiquate signal to decode a decent image.

On this mornings pass I received these two images:

The first, was while the ISS was nearly directly over virginia, and was only approx 250 miles away.

The second image was when the ISS was nearly setting to our north, so it was somewhere over the New England states. Things were getting pretty scratchy, I am rather surprised that the image was even recognizable.